Chapter Text
The emergency department never truly slept. It only thinned its breath, lowered its voice, waited. When the fluorescent lights came fully alive for the morning shift, the room responded like a patient pulled too quickly from sedation—monitors stuttering awake, IV pumps chirping complaints, the antiseptic sting of chlorhexidine cutting through stale coffee and last night’s exhaustion. Somewhere, a heart monitor called out a rhythm it would repeat until someone listened.
Dr. Robinavitch listened to everything.
He stood at the central desk, coffee cooling untouched beside him, already scanning the tracking board. Names, chief complaints, room numbers. Red for critical, yellow for waiting, green for deceptive calm. His hands rested flat against the counter, fingers spread as if anchoring himself to the department. It was an unconscious habit. If he kept his hands still for just a moment before the rush, he could pretend—briefly—that the day might not take something from him.
That illusion lasted exactly eight seconds.
“Room five is hypotensive,” a nurse called.
Robby was already moving. “Fluids wide open. Two large-bore IVs. Get a lactate and blood cultures. Start norepinephrine if the pressure doesn’t come up.”
His voice never rose. It didn’t need to. The ER moved when he spoke, pivoting toward him like iron filings to a magnet. Residents fell into step, nurses anticipating orders before they were finished. He checked a pulse without glancing at the clock, assessed capillary refill, scanned skin color and breathing in a single sweep. Airway, breathing, circulation—ABCs drilled so deeply into him they had become instinct.
He pressed his thumb into a patient’s sternum, eliciting a groan. Responsive. Good enough—for now.
Robby’s hands were steady. They always were.
Dennis Whittaker stood just outside the room, posture careful, notebook tucked under one arm like a shield. Student doctor. New enough that the chaos still rattled him, smart enough not to let it show. He watched Robby work the way some people watched storms—aware of the danger, unable to look away.
“Dennis,” Robby said, not turning. “Vitals?”
“BP eighty-eight over fifty,” Dennis replied promptly. “Tachycardic. Oxygen sat ninety-two on room air.”
“Good. Differential?”
Dennis hesitated just long enough to think. “Sepsis. Possibly internal bleed.”
Robby nodded once. Not praise—permission. “Stay with him. Call me if he drops.”
Dennis did, chest loosening at the approval he hadn’t been looking for but felt anyway.
The shift accelerated from there. A woman with crushing chest pain clutching her sternum. A teenager with a laceration that looked worse than it was. A man coughing pink-tinged sputum into a paper towel. The board filled faster than it cleared.
Robby moved between rooms like a constant, sleeves rolled, hands always busy—palpating abdomens, checking pupils, guiding procedures with brief, precise touches. He corrected residents by repositioning their fingers rather than criticizing their technique. It was faster. Kinder.
His hands save lives, but he feels like they’re the part of him that will ruin his career.
Dennis found himself pulled closer without meaning to be. Each time Robby addressed him, his attention sharpened, eyes tracking the movement of Robby’s hands, the way they communicated confidence even when his face didn’t. When Robby adjusted Dennis’s stethoscope placement—just two fingers, warm and certain—Dennis’s breath caught.
“Listen again,” Robby murmured.
Dennis did. Crackles, faint but unmistakable.
Robby withdrew his fingers just as quickly, jaw tightening as if he’d crossed an invisible line. Someone at the nurses’ station glanced up, eyes flicking between them before dropping back to a chart.
The ER noticed things like that. It always did.
Robby felt it then—a familiar pressure blooming behind his ribs. Not pain. Not yet. Just weight. Expectation. Responsibility. He straightened, creating space where instinct had narrowed it.
“Don’t get tunnel vision,” he said briskly. “You miss things that way.”
Dennis nodded, though his eyes lingered, searching Robby’s face for something unsaid.
The trauma pager shattered the moment.
“MVC inbound. Two minutes.”
Robby was already issuing orders. “Trauma one. Full activation. Get respiratory down here.”
The department surged into motion, voices overlapping, beds rolling, doors swinging wide. Robby disappeared into it, swallowed by the work that demanded everything from him and gave nothing back.
Dennis followed, because of course he did.
As the ambulance bay doors burst open and the gurney came flying in, Robby took the head of the bed without hesitation, hands anchoring the patient’s airway, voice calm amid the chaos.
“On my count,” he said. “One—two—three.”
Dennis watched him then, really watched. The way Robby carried the weight of the room without flinching. The way the ER leaned on him, demanded from him, trusted him absolutely.
Dennis felt something tighten in his chest.
The shift was fully alive now. There would be no slowing it. No hiding. No space untouched by light.
And somewhere beneath the fluorescent glare and the steady beep of monitors, something fragile had already begun—unnoticed, undocumented, and impossible to undo.
_________________
The trauma bay never waited for anyone to catch up.
Monitors screamed before Dennis could fully register the patient’s face—heart rate racing, blood pressure collapsing, the sharp metallic smell of blood already seeping into the room. Someone called out the mechanism of injury—high-speed collision, steering wheel deformity, possible ejection—and the words stacked on top of each other until they barely meant anything at all.
“GCS is dropping.”
“Abdomen’s rigid.”
“Pressure’s not holding.”
The patient moaned, a wet, fractured sound that cut off when Dr. Robby stepped in, calm as if he’d been expecting this exact moment all day.
“Alright,” Robby said, voice even. “Let’s move.”
Hands moved. Beds rolled. Curtains flew open. Dennis found himself exactly where he’d been told to stand, spine straight, hands clasped too tightly in front of him. Trauma always felt like controlled chaos—like standing inside a storm where everyone else somehow knew which way was north.
Robby leaned over the patient, fingers pressing into the abdomen with practiced certainty. The response was immediate: involuntary guarding, a wince, a sharp inhale.
“Blood in the belly until proven otherwise,” Robby said. Then, quieter, angled just enough for Dennis to hear, “What’s the next step?”
Dennis swallowed. “Exploratory laparotomy,” he said, grateful his voice didn’t betray him.
Robby nodded once. Not praise. Not correction. Just confirmation.
“Good. Write it down.”
An exploratory laparotomy is a common, urgent surgical procedure following a motor vehicle collision when internal bleeding or organ damage is suspected. Dennis knows this because of his extensive research, he explored everything and anything he could on the medical workforce. Dennis wishes it could save him from situations such as these like it saved him from Nebraska. The surgical procedure lasts 1-4 hours, Dennis is writing things down, indulged in what he can do in this moment before he thinks about..
Hes thinking about it again.
On Dennis’s first shift, everyone introduced themselves in a circle, including Dennis. Robby and his eyes caught like they knew the risk already.
But it’s not just that it’s the hands. Dr. Robby’s hands knew what to do before he did, and they almost grounded him in a way. He’d rest them on gurneys, counters and god. The way the doctor rests his thumb on the nook of Dennis’s jugular to move him, ground him almost, evoked something blooming in the student doctor.
Dennis hadn’t grown up with language for this kind of wanting. Where he came from, affection was practical—handed down in the form of chores shared, fences fixed, meals eaten without complaint. His father’s love lived in silence. His brothers’ love lived in competition.
There hadn’t been room for softness. There had been even less room for men who noticed other men too closely.
Back home, queerness existed only as a cautionary tale, a punchline delivered under breath. Dennis learned early how to swallow questions whole. He learned how to make himself useful instead. That skill had carried him all the way here.
It was supposed to be enough.
Robby peels off his gloves at the end, bloodied and spent, and looks at Dennis—not unkindly.
“You did good today,” he says. Then, after a pause, “Don’t confuse feeling something with doing something about it. In medicine—or in life.”
Dennis nods, because that’s what he’s always done.
But the wanting doesn’t go anywhere.
________________
Robby knows better than to look.
He does it anyway.
Not constantly—not obviously. That would be sloppy. That would be something someone might notice. But there are moments during this surgery where attention fractures just enough to let instinct in. A pause while suction clears the field. The half second it takes to reach for a clamp. The quiet, suspended stretch between instruction and compliance.
That’s when Robby looks at Dennis.
Dennis stands where he’s supposed to—still, alert, hands folded just right. He’s watching the incision like it might speak back to him, eyes tracking every movement Robby makes with a kind of reverence that feels… dangerous.
Robby tells himself it’s normal. Students stare. They always do. Especially the good ones. Especially the ones who want this badly enough to disappear into it.
Still, Robby feels it every time their eyes meet.
It’s not hunger. That would be easier. Hunger is loud. Hunger demands something.
This is worse. This is quiet. This is wanting that knows better.
“Retract,” Robby says, voice steady.
Dennis’s response is immediate—precise, careful, like he’s afraid of touching the moment too hard and breaking it. Their hands come close. Not touching. Never touching.
Robby’s gaze flicks up again before he can stop himself.
Dennis is looking at him.
Not blankly. Not blank at all. There’s something naked in it, something unguarded that Dennis hasn’t learned how to hide yet, and it hits Robby low and sharp. He looks away first. He always does.
This is not a line he crosses. It’s not even one he approaches.
He has spent years building rules sturdy enough to stand on:
Don’t notice.
Don’t linger.
Don’t let your mind finish the thought.
The body, unfortunately, does not care about rules.
“Watch the color,” Robby says, narrating as he works, because teaching is safe. Teaching has structure. Teaching gives his hands somewhere to put the feeling. “That bleed’s venous. We’re not chasing it.”
“Yes, doctor,” Dennis says.
Doctor. Not Robby.
Good.
Except—Dennis is different today.
Robby notices it not because of what Dennis does, but because of what he doesn’t. He doesn’t ask the question that’s sitting right there in his eyes. He doesn’t lean in the extra inch. He doesn’t let his attention drift past the surgical field.
He’s smaller somehow. Contained.
Withdrawn.
Robby files it away while tying off a vessel. The room hums. Monitors beep. Someone adjusts the lights. Trauma keeps moving, relentless, indifferent to interior lives.
Dennis doesn’t feel rebellious, Robby realizes suddenly.
He feels wrong.
It’s the way he flinches—not from blood, but from proximity. The way he checks himself before every movement, like there’s an invisible list he’s terrified of violating.
Robby has seen that look before.
It belongs to people who learned early that wanting is a liability.
He remembers a younger version of himself, brilliant and careful and silent, memorizing rules that had nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with survival.
Don’t want loudly.
Don’t want men.
Don’t want what isn’t yours.
Robby swallows and focuses on the closure.
“Dennis,” he says, deliberately, and Dennis’s head snaps up before he can stop himself. Their eyes lock again—longer this time. Too long.
Robby feels it in his chest, the stupid, aching pull of recognition.
“Tell me what you’re thinking.”
Dennis hesitates. Just a beat. Just enough.
“I—” He stops, recalibrates. “I’m tracking the count and the closure.”
It’s a perfect answer.
It’s also a lie of omission.
Robby nods like he accepts it, because this is not the place. This is not the time. He finishes the suture with hands that do not shake, because he has learned how to be good at not reaching for what he wants.
Later—much later—he will tell himself that the looking doesn’t count. That longing kept behind the eyes is harmless.
But during surgery, when Dennis glances at him one last time—soft, careful, unbearably open—Robby knows exactly how pathetic it is.
How badly he wants to be allowed to look back.